Poplar: a Council That Defied the

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Two The establishment of a by all sides as a victory for the Labour council in Poplar over the Tory-Liberal coalition government, and as a victory for direct action over constitutional action.

This was an embarrassment to Labour's right wing and strengthened them in their resolve both to remove Lansbury as editor of the Daily Herald and : to : start the exclusion of Communists from the Labour Party. Several of the councillors were openly Communist Party members.

This is a subject on which Branson's book is weak. The activities of Communists as councillors was a subject of heated debate in the revolutionary movement of the day.

'Conflicts inevitably occured between Communists within the local government structure and those outside.

For instance, Communists led both the unemployed workers in Poplar and the Board of Guardians which controlled Poor Relief payments!

Strong base

It would be important for us now to know how these conflicts were resolved within the Communist Party.

Another question insuffic¡ently dealt with is the relationship of the working class to the ultia left Communists around Sylvia Pankhurst.

Pankhurst had a strong base of support in Poplar through her work in the suffragette movement, and her later opposition to the war and support for the Russian Revolution.

But she remained completely opposed to entry into the Labour Party and condemned as 'spreading illusions in reformism' any attempt to get elected as councillors or MPs.

In one sense the question is answered by the mass mobilisation which accompanied the arrest of the councillors.

But later developments around the rate of poor relief did split the councillors from a section of the unemployed.

Poplar continued to pay relief at above the official scale -the difference being paid out of local rates. Various attempts to force them to ieduce it failed. The government withheld loans to which Poplar, like every other borough, was entitled.

They issued an "order" that relief above the official scale was illegal. Poplar retaliated by threatening another • strike against paying central rates.

The Poplar Guardians claimed "special circumstançes" for every payment which meant that the district auditor had to investigate every case before the payments could be disallowed and the councillors surcharged.

The government seemed anxious. to avoid another struggle. The auditors reports failed to appear for years..

Meanwhile the recession and massive defeats of the trade unions had enabled employers to reduce wages. The rate of poor relief was by 1923 considerably more than many employed workers could earn.

The official ministry rate of ARET . Then the Lastar strike goodby Emera the TGWU. Poplar Tows Fal became the strike headquarters and the Guardians agreed to pay strikers relief-to the horror of the local press (and IGWU leaders). One in four of Poplar's -population was now on relief.

At the end of the strike it was decided to cut the Poplar relief scale, leaving it still above the official legal scale of 9d per: day per person.

Although the majority of the unemployed grouped around Led Communist Party-domina• National Unemployed Workers Movement went along with this, it led to an angry confrontation with members of the Unemployed Workers Organisation run by Sylvia Pankhurst.

The incident raises important questions. Of course the difficulties were forced on Poplar by the right wing. The success of Morrison in preventing action in other boroughs left Poplar isolated. And the betrayals of Bevin and others over wages put pressure on the level of Poplar's wages and relief payments.

Although the councillors had the support of the Trades council, the Labour Party, and tacitly the CP for their decision it does seem to represent a watershed.

Legalistic Afterwards Poplar's conflicts with the government seem to have: been fought in an increasingly legalistic way without the mass involvement of =fi= matter of course be made to starve more quickly under the care of the Guardians of the FOOr."

The final stage of the struggles was over council wage rates, and the surcharging of councillors for "excessive" wage and relief payments. This came after the failure of the first Labour government in 1924 had further demoralised workers.

By this time Poplar's £4 a week minimum wage was 40% for men and 78% for women above the wages in surrounding boroughs. • The legal proceedings against the Poplar counçillors this time hinged on whether the "duty to fix wage rates" given to councils by the Local Government Act meant any wage rates they chose.

Surcharged

The House of Lords decided in April 1925 that it must be based on comparison with the going rate for the job and not on "eccentric principles of socialistic philanthropy or by a 200028 Ernest Bevin Poplar rally feminist ambition to secure equality of the sexes in the matter of wages.

The councillors were now to be surcharged for wages paid рол, ало во. 32 о prison In all about £2 million at today's about £60,000 each. None o the councillor had any property Neville Chamberlain, the looking for a confrontațion, and the Poplar Council negotiatec ompromise Poplar 'educe its wages by 20° In return the Minister would cancel Council could keep equal pay for women and could tie the new wages to a cost of livin index Sire or women for and kept permanent local boroughs and private employers. This was put to the workforce and carried 700 to 2 Local employers of course Socialist Press pamphlet offensive.

postag fross BSL, BM BOx 5277 London WCIN 3XX. published by Lawrence and Wishart. resented this deal! When the defeat of the General Strike, strengthened their position, they provoked a new crisis by taking Neville Chamberlain. to court and having his cancellation of the surcharges declared illegal.

•Control It was then that the present system of control of local authorities was established. Chamberlain brought in a new Act under which surcharged councillors would be disqualified from office for five years, and • surcharges could not be waived by the minister, However past surcharges including those on Poplar were cancelled. So the employers did not get their vengeance on Poplar. But the ground was prepared för the attacks on the Clay Cross councillors and now the Camden councillors.

But what emerges most vividly from Branson's book is that the legal situation of councillors is not the main difference between Poplar and today's struggles.

Mass movement

• Poplar council established and led a mass movement. They sought out and prepared an area of confrontation with the government and stood firmly against attempts to make, workers bear the cost of the crisis. Changes in the law or absurd interpretations of the law byojudges were powerless against them as long as they had this movement behind them.

George. Lansbury may be left to-sum up their experience:

"Baldwin, Chamberlain; Churchill, Birkenhead and the rest do not mind Labour and 'socialist majorities that are content to keep things as they are. They do not mind a Labour government i it Is a nice Sunday Afternoon Government that is content to leave untouched the sacred ark of the covenant of capitalism ... Our governing class, with the ingenuity and cunning they know so well how to exercise, allow the workers to retain all the outward signs and symbols of democracy: We elect municipal councils and other authorities but after election if they dàre to put socialist policies into operation the "artful dodgers" who rule us scheme and plot to overthrow Labour majorities."

"What matters is not what we say but what we do."

Concluded

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"The grid of brotherhood" also extends to daily languare Oh well. You can learn something, new every dayeven if it. unsettles your most cherished illusions.

I certainly learnt something when I read Dale Spender's Man Made Language.

. It is a sustained assault on many of my most treasured prejudices about the English language. It was tempting to put the book down and try to brush it aside. But I stuck at it. She has a point.

When I studied English at school and University I saw it• as a treasure house of a language : -one combining the very best of the Romance languages and the Germanic heritage: a language of flexibility, of nuance, of subtlety, giving scope for the fullest range of meanings.

• Excluded But' Dale Spender points to many nuances and 'meanings that find no reflection or expression in English. She shows women down the ages which why it is the experience have been excluded not only from the literature but also the day-to-day use of English.

The English language for instance has no word to convey the agonising experience of childbirth as experienced by countless millions of women.

It has no word that can really embody and convey the horror, the terror, the humiliation, the utterly disgusting nature of rape. Unlike other four-letter taboo words, tape' trips readily off the tongue even in polite conversation and has become annexed as a trite image-the Tape' of the countryside,, the rape' of the coal industry.

Here and elsewhere English has gaps where there should be Fords to express the meaning the daily experience women.

Instead, as a language, English is the product of male. theologians, male translators, male lexicographers, male ideologists, male politicians, male professors, male grammarians and successive male-dominated social orders.

And its development has gone hand in hand with the development of capitalism:

Indeed the rise of the • English language to social acceptability amongst the .court French and Latin in the 14th century coincided with the first emergence of the: embryonic British bourgeoisie.

Chaucer, the first major poet in English was à prime product of this new social class (and like most other English poets that spring to mind, a man).

From its very 'first days, therefore, the English language has been defined, developed, expanded and refined largely by men for men.

This has created conditions where, as Dale Spender points out, the male is the norm in English: and the feminine is cofsistently regarded as 'negaLister reviews Dale Spender's tive' in relation to the masculine.

"The semantic rule which has been responsible for the manifestation of sexism in the language can be simply stated: there are two fundamental categories, male and minus male. To be linked with male is to be linked with a range of meanings which are positive and good: to be linked to minus male is to be linked to the absence of these qualities..."

Spender, p.23 • She points to a string of descriptive words in which the female variant has become deniMade Language» (Routledge, £4.95)

BOTE grated-often: by sexually. debased meanings: among them lady, • dame, governess, courtesan, madam, mistress, queen.

Most professional. titles are automatically construed as male unless prefixed with the qualification "female" or "woman"doctor, writer, etc.

Spender underlines the dis-" appearance of women's names in bourgeois marriage as part of the submergence of women's. identity and experience. And she examines the problems for women in expressing themselves in a language which systematically, degrades them or ignores them.

Spender undermines some hoary old myths-in particular the "theories" designed to show from their use of language that women- are by nature "less assertive" than, men and the notion that women talk more thạn men. • In reality much of the research on such questions is itself sex-biased in favour of "the male as norm". : In a series of experiments of mixed sex discussions it was the men who spoke more often than the women and dominated the discussion.

Many of the mannerisms used as examples of women's "inferior" language simply reflect the oppressed position of women in society.

In Chapter 5- Language and Reality: Who Made the World?' -comes an intriguing section on the use of the term "man" and "he" to mean the human race. Spender traces the development of this usage from the 16th Century to the present day through a succession of (male) grammarians, and shows from a series. of text: book references that in practice the term "man" is generally understood not at referring equally to both sexes but as referring specifitally to the male of the species.

Women writers

Spender also has an interesting chapter on women writerstheir difficulties in penetrating a preserve so heavlly dominated by men and the fürther attacks and denigration that many of them suffer at the hands of (male) critics and publishers.

Her book is challenging. It is enlightening: But in many respects it is also pretty awful.

It is repetitive and extremely wordy in "its arguments. The same positions could have been argued in half as many words. And the space saved could usefully have been devoted to expanding the section which to me was the most intriguing and worrying-the areas of experience and concern which are not adequately " catered for in English, and the attempts which. feminists have made to fill these. gaps.

In addition a number of the examples that are given of sexism in language seem very weak. And for some reason Spender includes an absolutely ludicrous yar ‚about one woman who wore herself out by staying up all night every night to put her hair in curlers for her husband each morning-scarcely a typical case of the oppression of women!

•But the most overriding limitation of the book is its nonmaterialist, feminist analysis of the development of language.

Bible

section of sexism in the lily guage of the Biblę-ignoring completely the fact that Christianity itself (along with every other form of religion) embodies and perpetuates the oppres sion of women.

And it pins its main hopes for the future on faith in the development i of. 'consciousness raising groups of the teminis movement.

While the appeal of such groups to sections of middle class women is better explained by Spender than in many other accounts, she still fails to offer any means through: whieh women can actually take steps to end the conditions that reinforce their oppression.

Like so many academics and intellectuals who move towards radical politics, Spender regards ideas and ideology and consciousness as the primary issues to be confronted, and the fight against oppression being some kind of grand teach-in in which the oppressors are confronted by the ultimate lecturé.

She fails to recognise that ideas and ideology flow from material conditions: that it is the material world of oppression which leads to sexist language and not vice versa.

Again and again language is falsely seen as a conscious plot, by men to keep women in their place:

Few of course would be stupid enough to deny that both 16th century lexicographers and 19th century grammarians felt that a woman's place was in the home as the appendage of a man.

But their use of language flows not from this as a preoccupation, but trom it as a preconception, one of the body of assumptions from which they approached the task of developing the overall ideology of the British bourgeoisie.

For the bourgeoisie today, as in its earliest period of forma-

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central pool of finance to cover poor relief was seen

NO-RENT STRIKE

PROUL VCHI

ur policies

outlining programme of action against the Tory

MOTIGER INO NODY